Hi! I'm Catherine.

A math, programming, and writing enthusiast. Harvard '22.

About Me

I'm a first year student at Harvard University studying computer science and mathematics. I have done some projects in number theory, reinforcement learning, and natural language processing. I am also heavily involved with the hackathon community.

1 of 24 students selected worldwide, full tuition paid for all participants in 2015. Utilized natural-language processing to aid disaster relief, specifically categorizing tweets from Hurricane Sandy into those asking for help and those providing help. Program now known as AI4ALL.

Work Experience

TechTogether

Front-End Developer •April 2018 to March 2019•Boston, MA

- Worked with a team of 30+ other students to organize TechTogether, Boston's largest all-female and femme non-binary hackathon (formerly known as SheHacks Boston).
- Front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) for the organization/event's website.

PixelHacks

Founder & Director •October 2016 to August 2018•San Jose, CA

- Founded & presided over PixelHacks, the Bay Area's first all-female and student-run high school hackathon. Introduced 200+ high school women to computer science, technology, and entrepreneurship.
- Oversaw logistics, managed team, & secured $50K+ of monetary & in-kind sponsorships over 2 years.
- Featured by Teen Vogue, Yahoo News, CS4ALL, and other outlets.
- Served as a mentor for future PixelHacks programs.

Emory University

Mathematics Research Fellow •June 2017 to July 2017•Atlanta, GA

- Participated in Emory University's NSF-sponsored REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates), a 6-week number theory research program headed by Ken Ono. Awarded through and sponsored by the Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative Fellowship.
- Co-authored and published paper about producing infinite families of polynomials that satisfy the Riemann Hypothesis.

Khan Academy's Student Advisory Council

Director•July 2015 to August 2017•San Jose, CA

- Headed the national council of 40 high school and college students.
- Designed, advised, and reviewed projects that helped improve Khan Academy’s content and strategy.

Projects

SafePlates

November 2018 to December 2018•Cambridge, MA

Created with Hannah L. for Harvard's CS50 Final Project. Safeplates is a web app that outputs restaurant recommendations based on a user's inputted dietary restrictions and location using Python (Flask, Selenium, Beautiful Soup), HTML, CSS, & Javascript.

Applying Reinforcement Learning to Creating a Math Teacher AI

February 2018 to June 2018•Oakland, CA

Built a platform that uses reinforcement learning to create automated teachers for math problems by training AI students. This platform involved a multi-AI system, with a recurrent neural network (RNN) based student AI and reinforcement learning based teacher AI. Also utilized the following libraries: Tensorflow, Keras, Gym, and Baselines (from OpenAI).

Polynomials That Behave Like The Riemann Zeta-Function

April 2017 to August 2017•Atlanta, GA

In this paper, revisiting work of Rodriguez-Villegas, we produce infinite families of polynomials that satisfy the essential expected properties of the Riemann zeta-function. We identify natural families of rational functions in x which are the generating functions for the values of “zeta-polynomials” Z_T(s). In analogy with the zeta-function, these polynomials satisfy the Riemann Hypothesis.

Saluton: Foreign Language Chatbot

March 2017•Fremont, CA

Created with Eileen P., Katherine M., and Karina H. Saluton is a chatbot that helps individuals learn foreign languages through conversational learning; it is deployed on Facebook messenger and coded using Javascript, Gupshup, and Google Translate's API (along with some application of natural language processing). Won Second Place Overall at HSHacks, the largest high school hackathon in the world. See the Devpost project submission here.

Arduino Autonomous Car

June 2016 to July 2016•San Jose, CA

Created with Ariel B. Employing multiple color sensors and a complicated detection algorithm, the Arduino car was able to successfully track down and follow a line on the ground in any direction. Watch a video of the line-following car here.

Letter Pop

March 2014 to June 2016•San Jose, CA

Letter Pop is an iOS and Android word game, in which there are letters on balloons and you pop the balloons to spell out valid words. The goal of this game is to improve users' spelling and vocabulary.

Visual Cryptography

April 2016 to May 2016•San Jose, CA

This project illustrates the concept of visual cryptography (as designed by Moni Naor and Adi Shamir) using 2-bit and 3-bit encryption programs. A photo consisting of only black and white pixels (two bits) is inputted into the program, and two images of seemingly random noise will be generated. The two images could be layered to create (“decrypt”) the original inputted image using XOR. Written in Java. See the project description here and the Github repo here.

Categorizing Hurricane Sandy Tweets Using Natural Language Processing

August 2015•Stanford, CA

Utilized natural-language processing to aid disaster relief, specifically categorizing tweets from Hurricane Sandy into those asking for help and those providing help. Coded in Python, employing a Bayesian model.

Awards & Honors

Future Leaders in AI Research Fellowship

AI4ALL •January 2018

Granted AI4ALL's Future Leaders in AI Research Fellowship to conduct research in the field of artificial intelligence.

President's Volunteer Service Gold Award

Corporation for National and Community Service •June 2017

Awarded for extensive amount of hours dedicated to volunteer service in education, especially in my efforts dedicated to bridging the gender gap in technology.

She++ #include Fellow

She++ •April 2017

1 of 30 students selected nationally out of over 500 students to present PixelHacks at the annual #include Summit held at Stanford University in an all-expense paid weekend in the Silicon Valley.